The Riverboat Gamblers
by ncisnewbie
Summary: Eric calls a college friend for help with the sub rescue. Afterward, they provide some interesting background on Mr. Beale's wild side. Submitted for #EricAppreciationWeek.


Standard Disclaimer: All characters (except Brittany) are property of Shane Brennan.

Cultural references to _Ferris Bueller's Day Off _are exactly that: I would not presume to claim that copyright, either!

* * *

While Nell worked the agencies to set up a rescue team, Eric worked on reconnaissance. He'd accessed a half-dozen security cams through the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. As soon as Nell got of the phone, Eric shouted, "That's the _Research One_. I've got a contact at Scripps!" He placed a call, and explained while it rang. "One of my college buddies is now a whale researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Memorized the barnacle patterns on four hundred whales."

"Hello, Brittany? It's Eric Beale," he greeted, putting it on speaker-phone.  
"Ferris Bealer! How are you? Calling about getting together for some Hot Socks?" The woman on the line answered heartily. Meanwhile, Nell first startled, then stared.

"_I'll explain later!"_ Eric mouthed to Nell.

"Actually, no, Brittany. I'm here with my colleague, Nell Jones and we're on speaker-phone, Britt."

"Hello, Brittany." It sounded like Nell was doing her best to hide the wariness in her voice.

"Hello, Nell Jones!" came the disembodied voice. "We probably owe you an explanation. Let's all get together for a beer sometime."

So while Nell muttered her consent, Eric continued, oblivious. "I actually got out of the blackjack racket a while back. Now I'm with NCIS, a federal law enforcement agency, calling 'cause we need your help."

Brittany asked, "What's up, Eric? I always figured you'd end up with the good guys."

"Are you on the _Research One_ right now?"

* * *

After the case, Eric and Nell met Brittany at a brew-pub near the harbor. Nell paused for a second and sized Brittany up. She was a blue-eyed blond version of Kensi Blye, but with a few more inches of height, mostly in the legs. Nell held her arms close to her frame, but said, "I wanted to thank you, Brittany, for helping us out there. Our boss is out of town and we were really struggling to put the team together to manage that rescue." She even managed a polite handshake.

"It was a pleasure. I wanted to see what Eric was up to after he ended his 'life of crime.'"

"'Life of crime?'" Eric asked defensively. "I still don't think we did anything illegal. Our code for blackjack broke the house rules, but we never broke any Nevada laws. I checked."

After Eric brought them each a wheat beer from the bar, Nell asked, "So what was the story? I've always wondered what Eric was like at blackjack."

Eric explained, "When I was at UCLA, I got pretty good at counting cards."

Brittany interrupted, "Pretty good? You were amazing."

"Yeah, well, Brittany had a different style of advantage play. She did something called shuffle tracking."

"We met on the bus when Student Government ran a field trip to Vegas."

"Brittany and I both sat in the front, studying away. Kept us safe from the party-kids in the back. First classwork, then reviewing our bet tables."

"When I saw Eric's bet table, I struck up a conversation."

"So, we went to town. We'd go into one casino, play blackjack until we'd tripled our money, then go on to another. By the time the bus left town, we were each up ten grand."

"Correction, Eric. You were up eight grand, I was up eleven." Brittany said, proudly.

Eric tilted his head in concession. "Still, not bad for a night's work."

"When we got back to campus, we kept in touch." Nell shot a dangerous look at Eric while Brittany continued with a laugh. "We perfected the statistics for what we each called level one and level two hot decks."

"How did that work, specifically?" Nell asked.

Brittany sounded unperturbed. "Eric's was the classic system. He'd count how many high cards and how many low cards had been dealt, and could figure whether the remaining cards were particularly high or low."

Eric continued, "Brittany did shuffle tracking. After the cards are played, they go face-down in a discard pile. Sometimes a cluster of six cards would be particularly hot. She'd remember the three cards"

"Four," Brittany interrupted.

"Four cards that got discarded on top of that cluster: the flag. After a shuffle, those cards would alternate with random cards, but when she saw the flag cards she knew the deck would be hot."

"And you could keep track of the four-card sequence that would tell you your cluster was coming up?" Nell confirmed.

"Yeah, it's kinda' a gift of mine. Since clusters are so rare, I'd be watching for about four flag sequences." Brittany looked at Eric for support.

"Watching for four separate four-card sequences at the same time?" Nell sounded incredulous.

"Working with Brittany helped me learn to work with super-sharp women." Eric explained, while Nell's eyes darted, again, between them.

After the waitress brought them an appetizer of fried green tomatoes, Brittany picked up the story. "After a couple trips to Vegas, we started wishing we knew when each other's system called it hot."

"Hence the hot socks?" Nell asked.

"No, we never went through with that. That would have been a crime. What we did was just advantage play." an aggrieved Eric explained. "We were thinking of hooking little ni-chrome heaters into socks, remote-controlled. We could have signaled each other with them. We would have used the socks if they caught onto our first code. All we used was a low-tech method of passing messages."

Nell's eyebrows lowered in suspicion. "How low-tech?"

Brittany continued, laughing as she went, "We went in as a couple of h…"

"Giggly, foolish," Eric interrupted, "college kids."

"Then, when my shuffle-track came up 'level one hot,' I'd give Eric a kiss: first base, level one. See? That way he'd know to bet aggressively, too."

Nell continued her prompting, "And if the counting came up hot…?"

Britt completed the sentence, "Eric gave me a kiss. Unless, of course, it was level two hot." She roared with laughter, and banged her beer mug on the table.

"Would that mean second base?" Nell asked warily.

"Ummm, yeah." Eric muttered. A knowing smile came across Brittany's face.

"Was there a level three hot?"

Eric answered, "Of course, but we only reached level three hot,"

"Can I get you another one?" the waitress asked Brittany. She declined while Nell stewed.

"We worked out the tables for level three hot, but only reached level three if counting and shuffle-tracking came up hot at the same time." Eric explained.

"Eric could also tell when the deck was cold." Brittany said proudly. "Our signal was a butt-squeeze when the deck was cold. That's how he got his nickname."

"I already heard about Ferris Bealer." Nell interjected.

Brittany continued with a laugh. "Well, with all the messages we were sending, 'Ferris Bealer' became 'Feeler.'"

"Feeler?" Nell grumbled. Exasperation finally cracked through her normally cheery exterior. "So you guys were groping each other over a card game? Did it lead anywhere?"

"It wasn't just a card game, Nell." Eric explained defensively. "We'd clear twenty grand a trip. That's how I got my video-game system. That's how I paid off my student loans."

"And everyone else's, too!" Brittany continued, while Nell's eyes popped open.

"Well, not everyone's!" He explained to Nell, "I was able to hack into the system at the office of student accounts. I'd find students who were about to get locked out of class, behind on their payments. I'd wire funds from my winnings into their account and the university would be none the wiser."

The cynical side of Nell came to the fore. "What, so they could flunk out instead?"

"Oh, of course not." Eric sounded like Nell had asked the silliest question in the world. "I hacked into the registrar's office as well. I'd only cover for students who had a 3.0 or higher." His tone became defensive and he tried to deflect attention. "But Brittany made a difference with her winnings, too."

Brittany confirmed, "Yeah, after I came out, I started donating to the gay rights causes."

Nell stumbled through saying, "So you're…?"

"Yup, my wife Cathy's home with the kids right now." She held up her hand with a simple gold band.

Both women turned on Eric, but it was Brittany who broke the silence. "And you didn't bother to tell her this?" Her voice dripped with incredulity.

"It didn't seem important." Eric whimpered. But then the rhetorical spirit burst into his veins like a shot of adrenaline. "That sub you helped us find had three times as much explosive as they used in Oklahoma City, and you helped us stop it from blowing up in the Port of Los Angeles. We saved the lives of two federal agents, one of whom is my boss." He turned to Nell. "In comparison to all that, what does it matter what Brittany's romantic preferences might be?"

"So you two never dated?" Nell asked.

"No, we dated, but I was never interested in … umm…anything physical...at least not, umm...recreationally." Brittany continued, while Eric grimaced. "Eric was too polite to cut his losses and move on. Finally I realized it wasn't just Eric." She paused. "We kept doing blackjack, kept using the code, but our relationship was just working together. Eric is the last man I ever dated."

They stared at their beers while LL Cool J. played on the bar's sound system. Finally, Nell broke the silence. "A while back, you said you were banned from Vegas. How'd that happen?"

Brittany gave a rueful laugh before answering. "During our senior year, we learned about the politics of two of the casino magnates. We didn't agree with either of them. We liked the irony of liberating money from their casinos to counter one guy's bile and the other one's blovium." For Brittany now, this was personal. "We started going just to their casinos. Got greedier too. Before it ended, we were up fifty grand in a single trip. That must have tripped some alert. The floor bosses took us each in for interrogation. I copped to the advantage play, and copped to, well, the 'cop-a-feel' code we'd developed."

Nell sounded surprised, "Wait. Eric, you were in there getting 'interrogated' by some casino goon, but you can't handle papa-bear Sam Hanna?"

Brittany looked at Eric with pride. "Goons, plural, Nell. They put two enforcers on Eric, but just one on me. They didn't know it was my idea to start getting political." She paused to collect her thoughts. "A few hours later, they let us out with the 'friendly advice' not to set foot in Vegas again."

"Both these guys were bigger than Sam. But anytime I see Sam, I get the flashbacks. Yeah, I know Sam's on the right side of the law. But still, I don't want to be reminded of the scariest night I've ever had." Eric confirmed.

"Even scarier than getting frelted, Wolfram?" Nell checked.

Eric waved his hand in dismissal. "That was during the daytime, so it doesn't count."

Brittany looked confused. "Frelted?"

"Yeah. Long story. Once, when I was in the field, I almost got killed in a vacuum test chamber, freeze-dried. Beforehand, we'd called it frelted, from 'freeze-melted.' Not the way I would want to go. I didn't, thanks to super-Nell, who could save my butt from a hundred miles away."

After that, the three friends spent the next hour comparing war stories. …


End file.
